More Profit 
Recipe of the month:
Is anyone cheering for you?
What you really want of course are your customers telling all their friends how wonderful you are. You really can’t beat that sort of marketing. Not only is it free but it actually works.
We trust our friends to tell the truth so if they say a new skin cream is fantastic, we buy it. But the opposite happens too. Have a bad experience and we tell anyone who will listen how awful it was.
So how do you know whether people are raving about your business or grumbling over it?
Here’s one way, and it’s a good way
What you need
· A net promoter scoring system
· Heaps of customers to rate you
· Energy to change what you do
What you do
First of all understand what “net promoter” is
Don’t worry about the terminology it sounds far more complicated than it is, all you actually need to know is:
1. Customers fall into three categories: promoters (those who worship you and shout about your good deeds from roof tops); passives (folk that like you but don’t tell anybody) and detractors (the grumbleweeds that tell as many people as possible just how awful you are). 2. Clearly you want to have many more promoters than detractors. So your net promoter score - which you want to be big - is the number of promoters less the number of detractors (for the purposes of scoring you can ignore the passives as they don’t do anything)
Next, get your customers to rate you You need some way of knowing whether your customers are promoters, passives or detractors 1. Ask your customers “how likely is it that you would recommend our business to a friend or colleague?” on a scale of 0 to 10 where 10 is highly recommend and 0 is never ever recommend. 2. Sort your results. Scores of 9-10 are promoters, scores of 7-8 are passives and everyone who is 0-6 are detractors (yes, that’s right, all those people who politely put down a 6 so as not to disappoint you are busy grumbling behind your back)
And finally you need to do something with the result 1. Ask the passives and detractors what you could do to improve your score
2. Ask the promoters what it is that you do in particular that gets them to rate you so highly
3. Change the way you do business according to the ideas and comments your customers come up with
4. And then of course, ask your customers again….to see if you have improved. The Net Promoter score was first talked about in the Harvard Business Review, but don't let that put you off - it is certainly not just for big companies. It’s a simple tool that can have a big impact on small businesses.
If you want to know more about Net Promoter you can visit the official website here. (Note, we aren't on the net promoter payroll; we just write about it because it's good)